I've been in the closed beta tests since much earlier in the year, so my time played is well over 100 hours as of writing. I gave it several patches and enough time to make sure I understood what direction it was going and that I was reasonably good at the game. The first 50 hours or so boil down to memorizing all the tedious knowledge checks, so it's fair to say you can't know how the game works until you reach that point. Taken as a whole, it's simply not very fun relative to other platform fighters.

You have a couple of buttons you can use until higher percents because base knockback values are bafflingly low across the board and SDI down is still strong. Advantage boils down to a handful of easy confirms. Because the skill floor is so high and getting your main confirms is so trivial, virtually nothing is impressive and the same things happen over and over. I have played people of every skill level now and it's all the same. When I win, it doesn't feel earned. When I lose, it doesn't feel earned. So many interactions boil down to a coin flip.

Neutral is mostly reduced to fishing for counter-hits or shield grabs out of floor hugging. A few characters have goofy win conditions reminiscent of Smash 4 up-throw > up-air. Other characters just have stray hits that kill very early. For many characters, sour spots combo into themselves, so it doesn't really matter if you aim as long as you keep mashing. This was a problem in Rivals 1, but it feels much worse in Rivals 2. Nearly every strong hit can also send you backwards, so even DI is another coin flip.

Edgeguarding is possible as some characters playing against some characters, but it's by far the weakest and least consequential it's ever been in any game I've played. This means that unless you're playing Fleet, almost every win condition goes back to your 1 or 2 basic confirms.

Orcane went from being my favorite character in Rivals 1 to my least favorite in Rivals 2. My orcane is level 150 purely because I have been desperate to be proven wrong and to derive some morsel of enjoyment. When I think about how little fun it is now and how all the really tedious characters are still yet to come, I am filled with despair. It's a hard pill to swallow, since I helped fund the project and was eager to get invested. For my money, the most disappointing sequel since Torchlight 3.

Game feel is just such a downgrade from Rivals of Aether 1 that ultimately, if you're coming from Rivals 1, it's near unplayable at times. The game feels REALLY stiff sometimes, doesn't have the same sauce that Rivals 1 had. The netcode feels pretty bad even though I'm wired in, some inputs get eaten entirely and my DI just doesn't register like at ALL sometimes. Ultimately, it's not AWFUL, but I can't stand it. They "kinda" fixed the floorhugging problem, wherein floorhugging was just an INSANE defensive option, but ultimately I still think drift DI should've been in the game. Dan REALLY doesn't want to add Drift DI and I know the team is sick of people talking about it, so I just won't play. It's honestly REALLY disappointing as a BIG Rivals 1 fan that the game ended up like this. At this point, since it's finally post release and they're doing "monthly events", I doubt the general game feel will change or improve at all, which is really disheartening. I don't mean this as like, a huge diss to the game, but really if I could request a refund, I probably would since I'm not likely to touch this game outside of the very few casual sessions I'll have with friends. I'm glad that other people can enjoy this game, but I just really can't recommend it at all.

as a really bad (non-melee) smash player, the new player experience in this game is honestly kinda garbage. I got 5 main problems with the game.

1. first of all, it's crazy to me that the "new player guide" just takes you to some external post which is essentially a compilation of some youtube videos. I really don't know how they thought it was acceptable to launch in this state. for a game that is trying to capture the smash and rivals and PM crowd of different skill levels, surely NEW player onboarding and retention would be an important factor to consider..?

2. there's hardly any offline content aside from just a lackluster arcade mode which doesn't feel very fleshed out. this means that you're paying about 20 bucks for a completely online 1v1 game, which would be fine if not for the fact that...

3. there's hardly anyone playing at the lower levels! (I'm talking bronze/stone/iron/wood.)
sure, most fighting games have a similar ladder experience where it's pretty much trial by fire, but at the very least you get matched up with someone who is around your skill level. i'm in bronze/stone and I keep getting matched with people of 900+ rank points and it's such a pointless exercise for us both because they stand to gain only TWO measly rank points whenever they inevitably beat me while I learn nothing about the game whenever I lose.

4. even if you try to avoid the sweats in ranked queue, casual matchmaking is pretty much completely dead and it's pretty much impossible to find any public lobbies.

5. my final gripe is that there's somehow no training mode matchmaking in 2024..? hello?? what are you guys doing? ultimate launched in 2018 and even that had a bare-bones "training mode" while you wait in queue. please please please rectify this sooner than later...

conclusion:
I really wanna like this game because the core gameplay is pretty fun; the devs have somehow managed to strike a good balance between accessibility and depth (or so they say.. I wouldnt really know about depth, I'm in bronze after all💀🤡)
but in its current state it's quite difficult for me to recommend to a completely new player. the game is severely lacking in so much basic functionality and feels incredibly unpolished.